TOLEDO, Ohio — City of Toledo elected officials, community leaders, first responders and those within the health community are being encouraged this week to join a Trauma Training Conference framed around foster care.
This two-day conference from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Tuesday and Wednesday is jointly hosted by NAMI Greater Toledo and CareNet to highlight the importance of accountability when it comes to leadership and organizations. The conference will be held at the Main Library at 325 N. Michigan Street.
NAMI Greater Toledo's Executive Director Marriah Kornowa said the event's focus, trauma training, is a basic concept. But the conference will be anything but, since the point is to dig deeper into the issue and try harder in the attempts to handle it.
"It's one thing to bring about awareness. It's another to change how we respond to it," Kornowa said. "Our goal is just to really encourage empathy and compassion but also hold leaders accountable for the part that they play."
Framing this conference through the traumatic pain of foster children. How through no fault of their own, these kids are taken from their homes and put into the system. Then they can be moved from home to home, waiting for a new safe norm that may or may not come. Being part of this process can be continuously retraumatizing.
<"A lot of our youth are living with six, seven traumatic experiences in their short lives," Kornowa said. "So how do we help bring about our awareness to not further traumatize these kids that are really just getting started in their resiliency journey."
CareNet's Executive Director Julie Grasson said several local and city organizations can make this trauma stop. While the focus is on children in foster care, many kids could benefit from the change.
"To take it to a new level and hopefully help our community take it to a new level is really where my passion is," Grasson said. "Sometimes we don't recognize that something really is broken because we've never taken a deeper look at it."
Both Kornowa and Grasson said trauma, especially in younger years, only builds if untreated.
"We want to get to a place where the trauma doesn't rule us and until we've addressed trauma, it tends to bubble up in places where we're not expecting it," Kornowa said.
"Trauma plays a big role in mental health diagnoses and chemical dependency," Grasson said.
Conference attendees are split over the two-day conference. Elected officials and company leaders are invited to day one and more community-focused groups like first responders and social workers are asked to join day two. Kornowa said even though Eventbrite may have stopped selling tickets, stop by.
For more information about day one of the Trauma Training Conference, click here. Day Two of the Trauma Training Conference details are here.